Guest Feedback: How Natural Language Processing Enhances Your Marketing, Menu and Customer Experiences

Natural language processing is a technology that combines big data and artificial intelligence together and brings it to the table. Today guests have choices like ordering delivery and meal kit services that threaten to disrupt margin-accretive dine-in business. Because of this, a deep understanding of guest expectations is more important than ever before. Natural language processing helps you automate key guest insights to give you the upper hand.

Natural language processing helps you automate key guest insights to give you the upper hand.

Voice feedback is cost-effective and fast to add to your pay-at-the-table tablets by simply allowing guests to enable the microphone, which will work together with software development kits. Voice feedback uses natural language processing to deliver real-time manager alerts, rich qualitative assessments of your menu and operations, and sentiment scores about both the total guest experience and nearly every subtle aspect of the guest experience imaginable.

Now you can leverage your pay-at-the-table hardware investment with voice feedback software integrations that automate guest feedback. Natural language processing is also used to automate social media monitoring. There are other use cases for natural language processing that you might be familiar with, including chatbots and voice command software like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri®, and Google Assistant.

Voice feedback uses two machine learning technologies: speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP). Google has recently promoted Cloud Speech API and Cloud Natural Language API to general availability. This was an important signal from Google that machine learning algorithms used to understand complex human speech and natural language expressions are fully trained for enterprise customers.

Let’s look at a few examples of where voice feedback deployments using speech recognition and NLP technologies from Google can be a game changer for the modern restaurant.

Menu

Is your soup of the day little too salty? Do customers wish you had some different IPAs on tap? Prompt guests to give nuanced comments on your menu at the table and get these indications prioritized in real-time with voice feedback. Voice feedback related to the beverages you sell on-premise can be a powerful data point to guide your future purchase decisions.

Customer Experiences

A patch of sticky floor underneath table 13 has been turning off customers for days on end. HVAC settings are slightly too hot or cold and making customers uncomfortable. Fix it faster with qualitative comments that are impossible to get from simple guest rating scores or the few pre-selected survey questions. Social media can also help in these situations but it’s not as comprehensive and fast as voice feedback at the table. Voice feedback makes it easy for all guests to share feedback so you get more of the data and insights you need to grow sales and guest loyalty.

Marketing

An advanced marketing use of voice feedback deployments using Cloud Natural Language is programmatic vertical targeting by geography in Google AdWords™ advertising service. After prompting guests to casually describe categories and events that interest them (e.g., concerts and music festivals), you can then enlist your media agency to make ad placements that target exactly the associated verticals and even correlate the messaging in these placements to the highest-ranked voice feedback about the menu or customer experience from the same target group. Advanced strategies like this leverage the full potential of voice feedback to increase uplift and ROI from your marketing budgets.